a ceremony at the Irish War Memorial Park in Islandbridge. The irony was that the occasion was unconnected with WW1. The ceremony was being held to honour the victims of World War Two and the Holocaust.7 But the association with the country’s premier Great War Memorial was inescapable and is what most people remember about the occasion.
The disappearance of the stigma associated with enlistment in the British Army in the Great War, has unfortunately, come too late for the generation of Irishmen who fought in the conflict. Of course their silence was often prompted by factors other than the reluctance of the society to which they returned to hear their stories. But that silence, enforced or voluntary, means that ‘memory’ can only be restored by the diligent work of historians and researchers. This current volume is but a useful starting point for the interested and engaged reader. The enlarged bibliography reflects much of the more recent narrative and analytical work produced on the subject. I would heartily recommend any of the works cited as the next port of call.
BACKGROUND NOTE
The use of military terminology and jargon is unavoidable in an enterprise like this so herewith some background information that may be of assistance in the reading of this book. Some, but not all, is repeated elsewhere in the text.
Before 1914 the small British Regular Army (comprising fewer than 750,000 regular soldiers and reservists worldwide) was composed of regiments which, to all intents and purposes, consisted of a 1st and 2nd battalion of about 1,000 men each. Third and fourth battalions were often attached to the regimental HQ and were used for training purposes. From 1914 to the beginning of 1918 with the creation by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener of a huge volunteer army (compulsory conscription in England, Scotland and Wales came in 1916) the army battalions were augmented by service battalions of fresh, inexperienced troops. Thus the Royal Irish Fusiliers had its two original battalions, a third and fourth battalion based at home and responsible for training and recruiting, and seven service battalions (5th to 11th) at different times during the course of the war.
Battalions, as a rule, were divided into four companies; these in turn were further subdivided into platoons. Before the officer corps became badly depleted a battalion would normally have been commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel, a company by a Major or Captain and platoons by a full Lieutenant. A Second Lieutenant (also known as a Subaltern) might have commanded a ‘section’ within a platoon though, depending on numbers, command of sections would often fall to a Non-Commissioned Officer (Sergeant Major, Sergeant etc.)
Battalions were banded, in groups of four, into brigades under the command of a Brigadier General. In early 1918, because of the extent of casualties, brigades were reduced to three battalions each. Above brigade level was the division, consisting of three brigades. The 10th (Irish) Division, for example, the first Irish volunteer division to be recruited, was made up of the 29th, 30th and 31st brigades. A division was usually commanded by a Major General. Above that again was the Corps; there were three or four divisions within this unit, which was under the command of a Lieutenant General. Four combined Corps made up an Army, under the command of a General. At the outset of the war, in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force travelling to France, had two Armies. This number had grown to five by 1917.
The first commander of the British Expeditionary Force was Field Marshal Sir John French. He was succeeded in December 1915 by General Sir Douglas Haig, who was elevated to the rank of Field Marshal in 1917. He held his position until the end of hostilities in November 1918. When it became clear that the war was not going to be swift and decisive a general proclamation was issued by the British government calling for 100,000 men to volunteer for three years service. This force, raised by Lord Kitchener, became known as K1 and included the first Irish division, the 10th.Further proclamations followed and the second New Army (K2) included the other nationalist division, the 16th. In the fifth New Army was the Loyalist 36th (Ulster) Division.
The battles and campaigns covered in this book have been selected as the most significant involving Irish troops. Others may argue that important engagements (such as the Battle of Loos) have been left out. Given the space available, however, it was not possible to include everything and I felt it better to devote more time and space to a smaller number of key battles. The period from the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force (the bulk of the Regular Army at the time) until just before the First Battle of Ypres saw the beginning of the destruction of the famous Irish units of the old Regular Army. This process continued with the annihilation of the 1st Dublins and 1st Munsters at Gallipoli in 1915 at the ‘V’ Beach landing.
The numbers of Irishmen involved in the war then grew exponentially with the introduction of the first volunteer unit, the 10th Division, at the Suvla Bay landings in Gallipoli in August 1915. Later that year the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division were introduced to the Western Front. These two divisions were Unionist and Nationalist mirror images, based on the politically oriented militias of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the National Volunteers. Both would suffer appalling casualties at the dismal Battle of the Somme in 1916, the 36th on the 1 July, the opening day of the offensive and the 16th in the September attacks on the tiny French villages of Guillemont and Ginchy.
The 10th Division, unlike the two other Irish divisions, became engaged in hostilities against two of Germany’s allies, the far-flung Ottoman Empire of Turkey and the Bulgarians. After being withdrawn from Turkish territory in Gallipoli the 10th found itself assisting the Serbians against an opportunistic attack by their traditional Bulgarian enemies towards the end of 1915. The division was based in Salonika in neutral Greece. By 1917 it had been moved to Palestine to assist General Allenby in removing the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire from the Holy Land.
Meanwhile the two other Irish Divisions found themselves side by side in the 2nd Army of General Plumer (who ranks alongside Allenby as one of the most capable British commanders of the war) and took part in the successful June 1917 offensive at Messines-Wytschaete in Belgium, a prelude to the long, wearisome and bloody Third Battle of Ypres (often referred to as Passchendeale). Here the 16th and the 36th came under the wing of the Fifth Army, led by an Irishman, General Gough (one of the least competent British commanders). The result was a disastrous erosion of morale and manpower and the continuation of the loss of the ‘Irish’ character of the two divisions as events at home (in the aftermath of the Easter 1916 Rising) reduced recruitment considerably.
Things got worse in 1918 when the Western front was almost lost to a massive German advance in March of that year. Fifth Army, with its numbers greatly depleted, bore the brunt of that assault and the 16th Division ceased to exist as an ‘Irish’ unit even in name. Many of the service battalions that had been recruited during Kitchener’s 1914 initiative were merged or disbanded. What was left of the 36th Division stayed together but the battalions which made up the Nationalist divisions (10th and 16th) were spread throughout the Army, giving rise to accusations of lack of trust in their commitment, post Easter 1916, to the cause for which they had signed up to fight.
When the curtain came down on the Great War, in November 1918, few of the men whose stories are carried right through this book and concluded in the final chapter were still with the same units they had started out with.
1. THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES
‘There’s a woman sobs her heart out,
With her head against the door.
For the man that’s called to leave her,
God have pity on the poor!
But it’s beat, drums, beat,
While the lads march down the street,
And it’s blow, trumpets, blow,
Keep your tears until
